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Thursday, May 24, 2018

Thursday Movie Picks #202: Friendship Movies

Hello
there and welcome to Thursday Movie Picks a weekly series where you
share your movie picks each Thursday. The rules are simple: based on the theme of the week pick three to five movies and tell us why you picked them. For further details and the schedule visit the series main page here.

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This week's Thursday Movie Picks is Friendship Movies

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This has to be a quick one since I totally mixed up the dates/themes so came up with my picks extremely late.

Heavenly Creatures (1994)

Intense friendship between two girls that go horribly wrong. Great performances by the the two leads.

Now and Then (1995)
I don't remember much of it now, but it is like the 90s friendship movie for young girls.

Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (2003)

Love Love this one! And at its center is the friendship between the captain and the doctor.

Harry Potter Movies (2001-2011)

Aside from wanting to go to Hogwarts and have magic, don't you just want to be friends with them too.

I love that you picked Master & Commander which fits so well. Great movie! Harry Potter is also great because friendship and love is what holds those films and books together. Heavenly Creatures is an excellent film that shows how friendship and love go towards a bad development. It’s especially bad since it is based on a true story. I haven’t seen your other one.

Heavenly Creatures takes the theme in a very dark direction but it is beautifully acted by Kate Winslet and Melanie Lynskey.

The HP movies vary in quality wildly but the friendship of the three principles remains strong throughout.

I wasn't terribly fond of Now and Then but fit very well.

I don't recall too much of Master & Commander outside of having liked it. I should really give it another go, I was sick when I saw it and drifted off a few times while it was on.

So many choices for this one, I narrowed down by deciding to go with films that focused on female friendships.

The Women (1939)-Wealthy happily married Mary Haines (Norma Shearer) spends her days in the company of a circle of equally well-heeled women friends whose main distraction is gossiping about each other. The worst offender is Mary’s cousin Sylvia Fowler (Rosalind Russell) a smiling Judas with a vicious streak. When Sylvia finds out at the beauty parlor that Mary’s husband is stepping out on her with a cheap piece of baggage named Crystal Allen (Joan Crawford) she makes sure Mary finds out protesting all the time she’s doing it for her own good. It’s off to Reno and back where new complications await Mary and her buddies both old and new. Witty comedy has an entirely female cast (down to the animals) and great dialog. Musicalized (pleasantly if unmemorably) in the 50’s as The Opposite Sex with Joan Collins stepping in for Crawford and shredded in 2008 with an abysmal redo.

Old Acquaintance (1943)-Serious minded Kit Marlowe (Bette Davis) and flighty Millie Drake (Miriam Hopkins) have been best friends since college. Several years on Kit is now an acclaimed, respected but not terribly profitable authoress while Millie has married and is expecting a child. During a visit Millie confides to Kit that she’s written a book as well, a romance novel, which Kit passes along to her publisher and which becomes an enormous hit followed year after year by one frothy concoction after another making Millie fantastically rich and successful. However Millie remains envious of Kit as her marriage fails and her daughter turns to Kit as a mother figure and their friendship is strained but never breaks. High class soap opera was notorious at the time for the behind the scenes feud between Davis and talented but legendarily difficult Hopkins-a shameless upstager. At one point Davis had to shake Hopkins hard in a scene and when she finished the crew broke into applause!

Beaches (1988)-On the Atlantic City beach in the 50’s child performer CC Bloom (Mayim Bialik) meets lost rich kid Hillary Whitney (Marcie Leeds) and they strike up what turns out to be a deep lifelong friendship as they grow up to be Bette Midler and Barbara Hershey. Except for a brief break their kinship endures just about every obstacle under the sun leading to a teary conclusion. Though there is solid work from Lainie Kazan as Midler’s overbearing mother and John Heard as a director both women fall for this is Midler and Hershey’s show and their powerful chemistry carries the movie.